And now they go gunning for each other’s jobs

The sharp ethnic division created in the city by different groups is now touching its peak. Hundreds of people have been killed while millions of daily wage earners are also being financially targeted by the rivals.
The Baloch were being fired from their jobs in the different parts of the city, especially from central part of the city while nearly 10,000 Urdu speaking residents of different areas of Karachi working in Hub and Gwadar also faced the same fate.
The ethnic divide is thus threatening the livelihood of millions of daily wagers who were now under fire financially from the rival political groups bent on imposing the writ of their faction in ‘enemy territory’.
In the first six months of the current year, around 500 people have been killed and around 70 percent of the assassinations were on ethnic basis. The victims mostly belong to either Baloch or Urdu-speaking communities. Analysts say that the government’s writ was nowhere to be found. The eruption of ethnic violence in this multi-ethnic city had put the livelihood of thousands of employees in jeopardy in areas such as Saddar, Lyari, and Keamari, as well as Hub and Gwadar in Balochistan.
After the killings on ethnic grounds, thousands of workers have been shown the door by their ‘helpless’ employers who have no choice but to succumb to the pressure being exerted by certain political elements, which demand an unconditional termination of the employees speaking a language other than their own.
Now it is a matter of routine for owners of businesses to receive life threats from diverse political groups, asking them to layoff employees on ethnic grounds. The employers were left with only one option where they either had to obey or face the consequences for their defiance. “After the Lyari operation, when I reported at work, my employer told me that he had to fire me because he was receiving life threats,” said Lal Magsi, a motor mechanic from Lyari. Inam Baloch, a labourer at the Karachi Port Trust told Pakistan Today that he and dozens of others were laid off after the Lyari operation.
“No one is willing to tell us why we were laid off, but we have heard that it was in response to the killings in Sher Shah, something we were not responsible for,” he complained. These developments and such tendencies would drastically divide Karachi along ethno-linguistic lines as the city was already reeling from rampant incidents of targeted killings.
The People’s Amn Committee spokesman Zafar Baloch confirmed that ‘targeted unemployment’ has so far resulted in the forced sackings of more than 3,000 people of Lyari, who were working in different areas of the city.
Nearly 10,000 residents of different areas of Karachi working in Hub and Gwadar also face the same fate. “We fear that there could be consequences in Hub and Gwadar too, but we do not want anybody to lose their job and we are not in favour of a violent response from different quarters,” Baloch said.